the sudden stillness of deep interconnectedness

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

Given that the editor of this site is indebted for much of her understanding of the dynamics of creativity to a noted physicist – David Bohm – it’s an unbounded delight to welcome a physicist with a passion for photography to the artisans’ gallery.

Andy Ilachinski‘s eye ranges over a vast and varied array of phenomena – he tends to leave his photographs untitled, preferring to group them instead into portfolios with titles such as Tao, Micro Worlds, Abstract Glyphs, Mystic Flame, Ice Abstracts, Synesthscapes, and various geographical locations.

On his page, he shares with poetic nuance the way his knowledge and understanding of the micro-universe informs his practice of photography, ultimately delivering him into “deep interconnectedness”.

 

Andy Ilachinski - Micro Worlds portfolio

 

I am, by training and profession, a physicist, specializing in the modeling of complex adaptive systems (with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics). However, both by temperament and inner muse, I am a photographer, and have been one for far longer than my Ph.D. gives me any right to claim an ownership by physics. Photography became a life-long pursuit for me the instant my parents gave me a Polaroid instamatic camera for my 10th birthday. I have been studying the mysterious relationship between inner experiences and outer realities ever since.

– Andy Ilachinski

… continue reading at Andy’s page

Other photographers featured at the artisans’ gallery:

john daido loori
dan dhruva baumbach
karen divine
roy money
dennis cordell
mitchell doshin cantor
lisa gakyo schaewe
ron rosenstock

who sees the tree?

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Piet Mondrian: The Red Tree (Evening), 1908 - 10, Oil on Canvas

Piet Mondrian: The Red Tree (Evening) 1908 – 1910

– – –

Look outside at the sleeping tree there. Who sees the tree?

… Does a body do the seeing or does awareness, consciousness, life see it? What sees the tree? Consciousness? – or a body-centered custodian of consciousness?

Where is the tree? Fifty-seven feet removed from a body-oriented ego-container of awareness, a judge who likes or dislikes what he sees? – or is the tree within awareness? Is the seeing of the tree the activity of a separate-from-the-thing-I-see recipient-of-life, a so-many-year-old male or female pump filled organism who looks out through bloodshot eyes and answers to the name of Bill? – or could it be that it is Deity being the “seeing”?

Indeed, isn’t it just possible that Isness, Reality, God, is the seer “seeing” and being the seen? Could it just be that “seeing” itself is the identity “we” are?

Could we be Life itself rather than the recipient of it? Indeed we can! We are!

– William Samuel, The Awareness of Self-Discovery

In order to understand the true meaning of Abstract Art,
we have to conceive of ourselves as a reflex (reflection) of reality.
This means we have to see ourselves as a mirror in which reality reflects itself.
– Piet Mondrian

Image source: www.pietmondrian.info

to be a tree

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Friedrich Grohe: Single tree in meadow, grey clouds on blue sky

 

This awareness that the observer is the observed is not a process of identification with the observed.  To identify ourselves with something is fairly easy.  Most of us identify ourselves with something – with our family, our husband or wife, our nation – and that leads to great misery and great wars.  We are considering something entirely different and we must understand it not verbally but in our core, right at the root of our being.

In ancient China before an artist began to paint anything – a tree, for instance – he would sit down in front of it for days, months, years.  He did not identify himself with the tree but he was the tree.  This means that there was no space between him and the tree, no space between the observer and the observed, no experiencer experiencing the beauty, the movement, the shadow, the depth of a leaf, the quality of colour.  He was totally the tree, and in that state only could he paint.

– J Krishnamurti,

Freedom from the Known

Photo credit:  Friedrich Grohe

the act of seeing

awareness, meditation and creativity

one with this rapturous world

… and colour was god

the dance of Me and Mu

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

It feels like time for a nod to Frederick Franck, mentor supreme, whose book The Awakened Eye provided the impetus and the title for this blog and website.

 

Frederick Franck: Leaf

 

For to the awakened eye no thing remains a mere thing. It reveals itself to be, instead of an object, an EVENT in the timeless abyss of time, an event of unfathomable meaning that happens to take place more or less simultaneously with the event I call “Me”. In the language of Zen this state of no-thingness, of selflessness, is called Mu (literally it means “no”), in which I become an empty vessel, filled by what the eye sees.

I let [the things being drawn] flow through this Mu, let them precipitate themselves onto the paper, as if without any “thinking”, any interference on my part.

For these moments to happen I have lived sixty-some years.

– Frederick Franck, The Awakened Eye

image source

pacem in terris

waking up to wonder

the leaf’s budding and dying are my own!

homage to Frederick Franck

seeing/drawing as meditation

the Face of faces

Frederick Franck at the artisans’ gallery

the 10 commandments
(Frederick Franck’s guidelines for the creative life)

the haiku moment

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Everything that is out there is also within.  One might say there is a cosmos without and a cosmos within.  In the haiku moment they are drawn together as one, each and every time.  And, over time, the distinction becomes less and less.  What a great gift is this grace we call haiku.  Do accept it.

– Gabriel Rosenstock
Haiku: The Gentle Art of Disappearing

 

Chesky Krumlov

 

a gcuid rún
á nochtadh ag crainn
don tsúil dhúisithe

trees
revealing their secrets
to the awakened eye

 

Photo-Haiga:
Haiku by Gabriel Rosenstock
Photo by Ron Rosenstock

gabriel rosenstock and ron rosenstock at the artisans’ gallery

Gabriels’ page: disappearing in the haiku moment